Sempstress

Quick Tip for Binding Tabs…

…without anyone looking at the finished tab and asking if you were drunk and wearing mittens when you sewed it. I mean, everybody “knows” that if you want to bind rounded tabs you just have to use bias tape. Like, duh. But be honest with me – how well does that action really work when you try it? Between you, me, and the interwebs, when I try to machine bias onto a rounded tab in one swell foop, it usually looks poo.  But a miracle happened last week, and my brain kicked in.  There’s a little bitty-bit of magic from millinery that makes the difference between the top corset (the drunken-mittens approach) and the bottom corset (so much nicer…). And it’s fast, people. It’s faster than fighting the normal Battle of the Bias… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Bias Binding, Bias Tape, Finishing, Sanity

New Demo: Controlling Tulle

So here’s the trouble with tutus… They are made of many, many layers of tulle*. And tulle, these days, is made of hate. I don’t want to sound all judgey-pants, but it’s true. Your average fabric store tulle is made of nylon, a fiber which suffers from a constant string of cheap, tragic affairs with single electrons. By the time you have 6 layers of nylon tulle mounted on the basque (that’s the shaped waist-band bit), you’ve actually sewn yourself a fluffy little Van de Graaff generator. A tutu-in-progress is amazing – you can actually watch threads fly from the floor towards the tutu where they permanently bond with with tulle. Effective for cleaning, perhaps, but not so good for the tutu which should ideally not look like some sort of worm-farm.  Just in case you, dear reader, ever find yourself herding tulle through a sewing machine, here are a few tricks I’ve picked up from a couple years of sewing dance concerts at the shop… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Dance, Sewing, Theater, Tips, Tulle, Tutus

New Demo: How to Grade a Pattern

No, not grade like what I do when my students turn in patterns! Grading a pattern is the process of sizing it up (or down). It sounds fairly intimidating, especially if you’ve ever seen any of the mysterious old-school tools for “assisting” in the process. (They’re a strange array of bars and levers, and I have absolutely no mortal clue what they’re meant to do or how they’re meant to do it.) Fortunately, there’s a quick and dirty way to grade a pattern… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alterations, Patterns

New Demo: Adding a Side Seam Gusset

Sometimes, bad things happen to good costumers. Like, your sister is throwing an 80′s party the next evening and you bomb out finding anything that can be mangled into some reasonable approximation of Cyndi Lauper so-unusual-excellence, and every bit of vintage you can find is a size 4. Now, that’s maybe not to traumatic if you actually are a size 4. I wouldn’t know, because as it turns out, my left thigh is a size 4. But I found the jacket of my dreams, and it was merely 4 or 5 sizes to small. What’s a girl to do? Gussets. Gussets will save you here. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: 1900s, 1980s, Gussets, Vintage Garments

Braggin’ about my students…

I had some excellent teachers when I was younger. The ones that were the most brilliant exemplified the sort of razor-thin line between creativity in the classroom and outright psychotic sadism. (My favorite was a bio teacher who came in to a dissection lab dressed as your classic maître d’, white gloves, linen towel on the arm and everything, carrying a silver tray, neatly lined with lettuce, and the objects of our academic investigations – cow eyeballs, each one with a toothpick neatly inserted into its optic nerve. It was brilliant object lesson in our cultural views on food. Half the class looked like they were going to vom.) I don’t teach biology, so I don’t get to play the gross-out card. Sadness is. But I do teach design, which has some other possibilities… ;) Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Classes, Coffee Filters, Design

New Demo: How to Cover a Button

I love covered buttons. They just make a design look so pulled-together. The problem is that that directions on the back of the covered button kits are a little bit less than useful. They’re actually kinda bad. So for anyone who has ever wondered, here’s the sitch…. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: buttons, tailoring

New Skill: Narrow Bound Button Holes

I love bound button holes. They’re beautiful beasties. The problem is, I don’t like fat bound button holes with a smaller button.  Many bound button holes are half inch, top to bottom. To my eye, that’s too much for a polite jacket. I prefer 1/4″. If you are similarly persnickety,  this is the bound button hole for you.  This is not the infamous turnsy-foldsy bound button hole you see in a lot of sewing books, which is difficult to do in some fabrics (like leather). This one is for those of us who are better at sewing than ironing. It is what I remember from a tailoring class, which may or may not be what was actually taught in the class. It does work out well, though. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: bound slits, button holes, tailoring

New Skill: Pad Stitching

Pad stitching is awesome. It’s fantastic. It’s often replaced with fusible interfacings and spray-glue products, and that’s a darn shame. Because pad stitching is pretty nifty. It’s used to bond an infrastructure layer (traditionally hair canvas in tailoring) to the layer it’s stiffening (often the under-collar). And the great thing is, it provides MORE STRUCTURAL GLORY than the original infrastructure product can on its own. Beat that with a stick! Read the rest of this entry »

Most Awesome Scissors EVER

I found these while packing the fashion construction lab. (Because we are moving. Again. We just moved the department in August, but now we are moving into our permanent home. The move is scheduled for a week before classes start. No pressure, right?) Anywhoo, I found these in a shockingly heavy box labeled “scissors” which, lo and behold, turned out to be full of scissors. Real scissors. The heavy, old kind made entirely of metal. And I saw these, and light shone, and angels sang, and I finally understood The Truth About Scissors(tm). No, seriously, here’s why they’re awesome…
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Cutting, scissors, tools

Happy Holidays, Internet…

I just couldn’t resist. Ok, I didn’t even try. I mean, really, I feel like someone had to, and I happened to have all the stuff, so…. Yeah. That totally  just happened.  Is this a shameless over-application of technology? Probably. Am I a great big nerd? Yep.  It’s cool. Sometimes a girl just has to get her geek on. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Apple, General Geekiness, Holidays, iMac, iPad